LinkedIn Resume Assistant: Will It Help You Create a Strong Resume?

By promising to ease the challenge of writing your resume, this new capability has caught the attention of many job hunters.

However, Resume Assistant is much like any tool purported to streamline your job search: it works best when you see it as another way to improve the process, not as a means of handing off the process itself.

Here are the pros and cons of using LinkedIn Resume Assistant to develop a compelling resume:

1 – LinkedIn Resume Assistant can cut down on your keyword research efforts.

When you’re embarking on a job hunt, gathering keywords from job postings is an important step for your resume. By quickly generating a list of skills and other relevant terms found in LinkedIn jobs and other Profiles, Resume Assistant can help make this research more manageable.

A caveat: many LinkedIn users fail to fully populate the site with valuable information, so you might get repetitive and mundane results (such as Operations Management for a COO or Budgeting for an Accountant).

A look at the Profiles of your most skilled colleagues or connections could yield better insights. Don’t forget to use other job boards, too, such as Indeed.com or Glassdoor.

And this is NOT a good thing. Rather than trying to populate a basic template, you’ll fare better with a customized presentation. Think of the reasons you’d tailor any important business document to the subject, target audience, and purpose. Your resume is of equal, if not greater importance!

When you limit yourself to the resume templates found in the Office 365 application, you’re showing employers a lack of imagination and resourcefulness. See How to Write a Standout Executive Resume for additional ways to distinguish yourself on a resume.

If you’re not already using LinkedIn to assess your job-seeking competition, you’re missing an important exercise. Not only will LinkedIn research help you gauge whether your career goals are realistic, you’ll also be able to identify unique capabilities for use on your resume.

Resume Assistant will match your job title to that of similar LinkedIn users, and show you snippets of their work history. It will also generate detail from LinkedIn Jobs that align with your experience and career stature. The idea is to jog your memory and prompt you to write keyword-specific resume content, enabling you to compete among professionals at the same level.

If you’re stumped for ideas, look at job postings or even resume samples for inspiration. Often, you’ll see achievements or projects that will remind you of your own success stories. The idea in using Resume Assistant is the same: you may have forgotten to note important facets of your work, such as the size of teams you’ve managed or new initiatives you’ve led.

This information is presented to help you recall important detail from past positions, education, or volunteer experience, NOT to claim it as your own.

5 – LinkedIn Resume Assistant won’t help you brand yourself.

This is probably the biggest objection most marketers have when it comes to Resume Assistant: a truly powerful and effective resume should distinguish you from others, not enable you to mimic them.

Want to make employers sit up straight when they get your resume? Then spend time on both keyword research from Resume Assistant and the hard work of real resume writing, where you develop power-packed success stories as proof of your performance.

If you find this part difficult, try a classic storytelling method such as Challenge-Action-Result (CAR). This technique helps you describe career wins by noting the Challenge or situation you faced, the Actions taken to resolve it, and the Result or business benefit to your employer.

Award-winning executive resume writer Laura Smith-Proulx of An Expert Resume (http://www.anexpertresume.com/) partners with executives and rising stars to capture top jobs.
A 10-time certified job search coach, master resume writer, LinkedIn expert, and former recruiter, Laura’s work has been featured in Forbes, CIO.com, CareerBuilder, Wall Street Journal, Time, Denver Post, Chicago Tribune, and other media.
She is the author of "How to Get Hired Faster: Proven Tips & Resources to Access the Hidden Job Market." Laura holds the US record for global resume TORI awards and is a columnist for Recruiter.com, Careerealism.com, and Job-Hunt.org.
View all posts by Laura Smith-Proulx, Executive Resume & LinkedIn Profile Expert, Job Search Coach, & Former Recruiter

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Award-winning executive resume writer Laura Smith-Proulx of An Expert Resume (http://www.anexpertresume.com/) partners with executives and rising stars to capture top jobs.
A 10-time certified job search coach, master resume writer, LinkedIn expert, and former recruiter, Laura’s work has been featured in Forbes, CIO.com, CareerBuilder, Wall Street Journal, Time, Denver Post, Chicago Tribune, and other media.
She is the author of "How to Get Hired Faster: Proven Tips & Resources to Access the Hidden Job Market." Laura holds the US record for global resume TORI awards and is a columnist for Recruiter.com, Careerealism.com, and Job-Hunt.org.